Dominican recently started a new videos page about two weeks ago. And it seems the site has already been relegated to the backburner for DU web projects.
As mentioned in my last post on this little innovation, the page features a few brief news videos posted to a web page for all to access. Although this is a revolutionary effort on the part of the university to give outsiders and insiders a glimpse of all Dominican has to offer, it appears the site has already fallen into disuse by those responsible for its creation.
The page has not been updated since I last posted about it nearly two weeks ago. Now, I may be expecting too much of this new institution, but I thought it was actually going to be regularly updated with short news stories and videos documenting lectures, student activities and other happenings on campus, sort of like an occasional Internet-only version of your garden variety TV news features. But there are still the same videos of Lund Gill Chair Stephen Kinzer's recent lectures and a couple of features portraying different events and occurrences on campus that took place in late August and early September. There have been improvements made since the site's initial start up, most notably each video receiving its own individual page. However, I couldn't figure out how to even get to the videos page; I had to follow my link from my previous post. It turns out the page is located on the Dominican homepage instead of somewhere where students are likely to access it, such as the myDU portal.
This seems a little silly to me. Frankly, I'm not surprised; it seems many websites started by individuals at Dominican fall by the wayside and are updated a few times when just starting out before being left to forever clutter the internet with outdated and/or irrelevant information. I think this opportunity is something that's not being realized to its fullest potential. This videos page could not only give the University some much-needed publicity if organized and promoted accordingly, but could also give students a resource for information about what's going on around campus. Event organizers always lament about a lack of attendance at on-campus events, but perhaps organizers could make use of this page and could advertise events or give students a "heads-up" about things they otherwise might not have thought twice about. This resource shouldn't be something completely controlled by the Marketing and Communications Department; it should be a resource the entire community can use to promote, inform or even educate their fellow Dominicans.
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4 comments:
SO what are you going to do about it?
I agree. I know it's a "startup" thing, but by the same token, our blogs kinda sucked at the beginning--but we plugged away (with Tracy's positive reinforcement) and made them rock. This video thing seems like a bit of a slacker project so far. Wap wah.
Yeah if I didn't have this class I wouldn't even know about this video page. They could definitely do more to promote it.
I think it was Voltaire who said the perfect is the enemy of the good, although I hear it more often from my colleague Chris Colmo. I love incremental change, and I can almost hear the Beatles refrain (another band that was very big when I was alive), "I have to admit it's getting better, it's getting better, all the time" (but I tend not to carry on with the next line, "can't get no worse..."). Is the glass half full or half empty? Ignoring George Carlin's sage observation, "it's twice as big as it needs to be," I try to be a half full person, especially when it comes to doing what I can to help Dominican get better and better. In this spirit I love the new OMC initiative and I'm sure it will continue getting better all the time.
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